Up Front With Martin B. Deutsch for 1991

December 1: THE HIGH LIFE ON THE HIGH SEAS
There’s no better gift for the road-weary frequent flyer than a cruise. Life at sea is only part of the cruise experience. The other key ingredient of this escape-from-stress holiday is the ports of call, the "land" portion of this total-immersion vacation.

November 1: THE NEWEST TWIST TO AN OLD TALE
I promise not to bring the subject up again. This year. I refer, of course, to the fact that must-fly, full-fare business travelers, who subsidize all those wonderful discount fares for leisure passengers, once again have been sandbagged. What a surprise! As usual, you’re being forced to fly at higher and higher fare levels while vacationers get deep discounts.

October 1: THE GREAT FREQUENT FLYER DEBATE
In a society besotted with shallow icons, who’d have ever thought that "ethics" would sell? Back in July, we carried a thoughtful though anonymous dissertation from a reader who questioned the ethics of frequent-travel award programs. Hundreds of you then took to your word processors and typewriters to communicate your thoughts on the ethics of frequent flyer plans.

September 1: A BETTER MOUSETRAP
Despite the tough economic times and the shrinkage of our travel-related advertising base, Frequent Flyer magazine's commitment to you is alive and well--and stronger than ever. We’re not cutting back or sitting back; you need and deserve a product that’s on the cutting edge of this unsettled and unpredictable marketplace. We pledged just that sort of magazine eleven years ago. We renew that pledge now.

August 1: I LIKE BEING ON THE ROAD
People ask me all the time, Why do you travel as much as you do? Why do you put up with all the grief? If your on-the-road experiences are such a hassle, why not ground yourself and cash in the frequent-flyer lifestyle? Well, there are some obvious answers to these queries. But the undeniable truth is that I like being on the road.

July 1: ETHICS AND THE FREQUENT TRAVEL PROGRAMS
The fax machine outside my office churned to life the other day and spit out a noteworthy—if anonymous—piece of business. A reader who has become ethically perplexed by the concept underlying the frequent travel programs faxed me a page of single-spaced commentary concerning the subject. I was sufficiently intrigued by this anonymous reader’s point of view that I submit it for your consideration.

June 1: THE DEUTSCH CURE: CRUISING
Detoxification from stress is a key objective for the frequent flyer racked by time-zone changes, profit expectations, the recession, labor-management disputes, and those daily surprises that inevitably nudge the blood pressure upward. There are lots of cures out there for this cluster of conditions. The Deutsch Cure is simple: take a cruise. Get away from it all, cut the cord, let the saltwater breezes soothe you back to serenity. Pack and unpack only once, pay only one bill, make only one booking.

May 1: L.A. STORY, FREQUENT FLYER STYLE
The average frequent flyer spends more than 80 days a year in hotel rooms. That’s almost three months a year. A very impressive statistic, or maybe a depressing one, depending on your point of view. In order to accommodate this flood of business travelers, the hotel industry has turned handstands to give the business community exactly what it wants. This market-given ability to choose and choose and choose—something tragically crippled in today’s U.S. airline environment—is a quantifiable plus for the frequent traveler.

April 1: IN THE NEW GERMANY, ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE
Here’s part two of my memos from Berlin. In February’s issue, I recalled a visit to Berlin the week after Germany said farewell to four decades of political apartheid. Despite all the problems that come with reunification, I wrote about the aura of goodwill and hope that suffuses a single Germany, a land that suddenly finds itself without "The Wall."

March 1: REST IN PEACE, EASTERN AIRLINES
On January 14 I flew to Miami to attend a close friend’s funeral. As fate would’ve had it, I was also taking part in the last few days of an airline that had flown the world’s skies since 1928. I go back a long way with Eastern, back to the late 1950s, when I shook hands and had a short conversation with Eddie Rickenbacker, the crusty Word War I flying ace who dominated EAL for parts of four decades.

February 1: REFLECTIONS ON THE NEW BERLIN
When a group of us arrived in Berlin on a day-trip, Germany had been reunited for exactly one week, and the Berlin Wall had been breached for less than a year. I’d never been to Berlin, but I found the transition to single-entity status impressive, if not reassuring. The grim border crossings between West and East were already dismantled and a general air of goodwill and careful optimism pervaded the totality that was once again Berlin.

January 1: CLOUDS IN OUR CRYSTAL BALL
The year we've just put to rest was not the way to launch a decade, especially one that came in with such high hopes and heady expectations. Many of us thought, naively, that the excesses of the eighties were behind us or about to show signs of mitigation.

Copyright © 1980-2007 by Martin B. Deutsch. All rights reserved.